Sierra de Aracena Andalucia Walking Guide Book Map

  Sierra de Aracena   
 
a little known destination on the Spanish mainland
Sierra De Aracena - a Walk! guide book 144 full colour pages; £11.99.      
   Sierra de Aracena book Specification & Contents

Sierra de Aracena Tour & Trail Map at 1:40,000 scale covers our walking region £3.99.      

   GPS navigation files available - see GPX Downloads
Digital Sierra de Aracena Tour & Trail Map available from    + Custom Map version for Garmins
 

A hundred kilometres north-west of Seville lies a region of truly unspoilt rural Spain. Once a province of Portugal the Sierra de Aracena encapsulates almost everything that we look for as the idyllic walking destination; rural beauty in flora and fauna, breathtaking landscapes, unspoilt towns and villages linked by old donkey trails. All it lacks are high mountains. The Spanish have known about this isolated region for sometime and arrive at weekends and in mid-summer, but on weekdays and out of season it returns to peaceful tranquility. Few 'outsiders' know of this delightful region and you can be the first to read about it in English. We first discovered the region five years ago, when we thought it too isolated to justify a guide. Since then we have returned regularly, completing our walking research and map surveys in Oct/Nov 2003 and final walking research in May 2004. Now we feel the time is here to introduce you to our secret.

Where to start describing this region is our problem, so we'll start with the urban environment. Just try and imagine a region where the streets of the small towns and villages are cobbled with chips of white marble, where the great baroque churches date from the time of the re-conquest when this was front line territory between the Christians and the Moors, where the narrow streets and alleys are still more suitable to laden donkeys than cars; avoid driving into the villages to reduce the chance of stress! Once you have been here a few days and have settled into the pace of life the regional capital of Aracena seems very cosmopolitan as you sit outside Bar Manzano watching life go by; this bar is infamous as a homing point for expats and visitors. In Linares de la Sierra they do not have doormats, they have their own marble design built into the street's surface. Also in Linares you can take coffee in the bullring, or behind the barred bar doors if a bullfight is taking place. In Almonaster la Real climb up to the mezquita tower for views over its famous bull ring to the immaculate town. Alajar has an amazing Meson restaurant to back up its generally stylish air. Only in the once abandoned, but now being slowly repopulated, hamlet of Los Madroñeros and Corterrangel is there no bar, elsewhere the tipicos range from stylish in Aracena and Almonaster to 'distressed basic' in Cortegana with most filling the middle ground. Arias Peña Montano is a must visit by car or on foot, where we have a short steep walk up to the Peña mirador. Every settlement is an eye opener and you could spend a week just strolling round these picturesque towns and villages.

Picture sloping meadows dotted with Cork Oaks where herds of inquisitve Iberian black pigs roam at will in a piggy paradise, switch to pollarded Chestnut trees with lively herds of goats, switch to the flock of sheep and lambs that graze outside the apartments at Villa Turistica Fuenteheridos, add in horses and donkeys grazing amongst the trees and meadows and you have the picture of an idyllic bucolic landscape. The wild life is equally impressive, we saw two black vultures on our first day and another two days later. On the steep trail up from the Los Molinos artist colony to the hilltop town of Cortegana we stopped to get our breath back. Five metres up the path a bullet head poked out of the undergrowth and stared at us; probably thinking 'You go all your life without seeing a Brawn, and then you see two at once.' Breaking eye contact the large otter scurried across the path and up into the overgrown hillside; our first ever wild otter!

Wild flowers abound like nowhere else. Botanists arriving in Spring will think they have landed in paradise. At first we tried keeping notes of the species, but had to give up because there were so many including several we had not seen before. The undergrazed meadows are a carpet of colour from the flowers. Wild Peonies colonise the chestnut orchards west of Castaño del Robledo. Occassionally one specie will dominate a meadow or hillside but normally there is a complete mix of species lining our walking routes. Keen plants people should double our walking times just to allow time to marvel at the wild flowers.

And the walking. With settlements linked by a rural network of tracks and trails centuries old you will not be seeing much of the quiet tarmac roads in the region. Tracks and trails range from immaculate cobbling to occassional cobbling to dirt and some are eroded by storm damage. Most of the time we are on clear well made trails but be ready for some rough stuff. This is not a mountainous region but the steep sided ridges that comprise the Sierra de Aracena have plenty of 'puff and grunt' ascents, most just melt away but Linares de la Sierra to Alajar when we were caught in a downpour was quite hard work. 'Adventurous leisure walker' is how we would catagorise the walking with plenty of ups and downs so a moderate level of fitness is needed. Ros walked all the routes in her Merrils and Cats sandals while I used a pair of Berghaus Vertimesh shoes, my Bestard Race K shoes seemed a bit 'over the top' for this terrain and were relegated to slippers around the apartment and for evening wear!

Sierra de Aracena is far from the realms of mass tourism and the nearest you will find to crowds are busloads of Spanish pensioners visiting the Grutas de Maravilla caves in Aracena and the famous ham factories in Jabugo. Horse riding holidays are becoming popular, expect jodphurs with breakfast at the Sierra de Aracena Hotel and Finca Valbono. Headwater offer an 'Undiscovered Andalucia' week of guided walking in the region. We flew to Malaga, picked up a pre-booked Peugot 206 and drove the 300 kilometres to stay at Villa Turistica de Fuenteheridos. There are hotels and modern hostels in Aracena, Fuenteheridos, Grazalema, Almonaster and La Posada in the country north of Cartagena; full accommodation information will be in the book. In Oct/Nov 2003 we visited the Feria de Setas in Aracena to marvel at the amazing wild mushrooms collected from the local woodland. This time it was the Feria de Animales like a small county show for cattle, sheep, goats and pigs; but mostly an excuse for the regions farmers to get together for three days of 'Archers' style conversation, eating and not a little drinking.
GPS navigation files now available for Sierra de Aracena - see PNFs
 

Sierra De Aracena - a Walk! guide book  144 full colour pages; £11.99.              
  



Sierra de Aracena Tour & Trail Map at 1:40,000 scale covers our walking region and beyond.£3.99.     

 

   

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